


Preventing Calamity

by Sinnatious



Category: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Kunsel is a Turk, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 04:02:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15573330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinnatious/pseuds/Sinnatious
Summary: Kunsel time travels to save the Planet.





	Preventing Calamity

**Author's Note:**

> There's two things in FF7 I can't seem to leave alone - time travel and Kunsel. So why not combine those? 
> 
> There's not much to this honestly, just a one shot to scratch that narrative itch. Also I've seen a bit of Turk!Kunsel floating around fandom so this was a bit of me playing with that concept too. It's unbeta'd and could use a lot more polish but this is me finally getting around to posting some fic backlog, hope you enjoy it.

 

 

“I don’t trust anyone else with this,” Veld says. “Of those surviving, you’re our best bet.”

The Time materia sits unnaturally cold and heavy in his hand. About twice as large as normal, and the colour a green so deep it looks almost black. When Kunsel rolls it in his palm the light scatters, giving it a pearlescent sheen.

“Why not Tseng?”

“Too old. He won’t have the flexibility you will. As it is, you’ll want to lie on any documentation. Just in case.”

That raises an uncomfortable point. “What happens to my past self?”

“It’s still entirely experimental, you understand. We’re not certain of what exactly will happen.” Veld folds his hands in his lap. Even now, with his once-pristine business suit replaced with a ragged white snow coat out of sheer necessity, he still radiates every bit of confidence and professionalism expected from the leader of the Turks. “Reeve suspects an overwrite. A merge between past and present, but you are of course still the same person. If we’re lucky, your physical age will average between the two. Mentally, consider it a double dose of the first ten years of your life, and a single dose of everything after that.”

Kunsel’s gaze snaps up. “By then he’ll already be-”

“I know.”

“Then how-”

“You’ll find a way.” Veld sighs. “There’s a limit to how far we can send anyone back. That’s why we can’t delay any longer. If we wait too long…”

They wouldn’t be able to go back past the point of no return.

Kunsel’s stare returns to the materia. They always fascinated him – so much power and potential packed into such a tiny object.

This one more than most.

“When do I leave?” he asks.

………………

Arriving in the past is unpleasant. He wakes up in the slums, head pounding and clothes just a little too tight on his body.

Nobody has paid him any mind. Possibly someone has rifled through his pockets and taken his gil, or possibly he didn’t have any in the first place. There’s no sign of the materia he’d been holding what felt like mere moments before. Whether it was stolen, or didn’t make the trip…

It doesn’t matter. The mere fact that he’s staring up at Midgar’s Plates is all the proof he needs that it worked.

He crawls into a shadowy alleyway and spends the rest of the day trying to put his head on straight, sorting through everything he could remember and everything he’d crammed into his head before making the jump. Only once the headache abates does he venture out to find the exact date.

The timing is as expected – the Wutai War is still underway, and ShinRa is slowly ramping up their recruiting for SOLDIER. Genesis Rhapsodos and Angeal Hewley have recently been promoted to the newly created First Class rank along with Sephiroth.

The names send an ugly shiver down his spine which he ignores in favour of making plans.

He hasn’t gained as many physical years as he’d hoped from the jump. He’s back to being a slightly underfed adolescent, still at least four years away from being recruited by the Turks.

Despite this, he has to find some way to kill Sephiroth.

Kunsel gets to work.

………………

He doesn’t have the contacts or resources he had in the future, but what Kunsel has is invisibility, knowledge, and skill. He blackmails and steals and in a matter of days he’s outfitted in clothes that fit and passable armour and most importantly, a top-of-the-line sniper rifle with the highest calibre bullets he can buy outside of going directly to ShinRa.

It feels heavy and awkward in his arms, and he spends three weeks out in the most deserted corner of the Wastes practicing with it. Kunsel’s speciality in the Turks had been blades, not guns, and even after three weeks of training he’s no top class sniper, but he’s not going to try to break any records, or hit a moving target. His full intention is to plant a bullet in the back of Sephiroth’s brain during a meeting.

ShinRa’s board meetings are typically held on the upper levels, beyond the angle of any vantage point, but Kunsel knows that the newly appointed First Class General has to endure a monthly meeting with the Security Department all the way down on Floor 12, in the logistics offices. ShinRa headquarters looms large over Midgar as a whole, but Kunsel tracks down a building in Sector 4 just tall and close enough to give him a clear shot through the windows into the meeting room.

He sets up three hours early, and waits. He waits until Sephiroth arrives, and takes his seat. Waits for his heart to stop thumping in panic at the sight, reminding himself that a glimpse of silver hair here does not yet mean death. He waits some more, watching through the slightly distorted view in the scope as one of the Sergeants gets up to give a presentation.

He sets his crosshairs on the back of Sephiroth’s head. Focuses. Refocuses. It’s not even four hundred metres as the condor flies, but he checks the wind, and carefully, so carefully, adjusts the barrel by a hair’s width.

Sephiroth doesn’t move. The sergeant at the head of the table is displaying graphs. The man closest to the door is staring at the clock above it.

Kunsel exhales, holds it, and lets his finger brush the trigger.

He doesn’t use a silencer, on account of range and accuracy. The bullet needed to be supersonic to hit before Sephiroth could react to the gunshot anyway.

He didn’t take the breaking glass into account.

It takes him less than five seconds to realise it’s a miss, that in the instant between the glass shattering and the bullet travelling the last three meters to the table Sephiroth has dodged it, with only a tear in the leather of his collar to show for it. It shouldn’t be possible – the laws of physics told him that Sephiroth should be dead, but the general is whole and alive and staring through the shattered window directly at his vantage point.

Kunsel doesn’t even try to salvage his kit. He takes fifteen seconds to wipe away what few fingerprints he’s left and then gets the hell out of dodge.

Afterwards, all of ShinRa’s management-level meetings are moved to a higher level, to rooms with no windows.

………………

Kunsel doesn’t let his first failure deter him. The mission was never expected to be easy – and better snipers than him had tried and failed to kill Sephiroth over the years. He’d simply hoped, that if it were early enough, unexpected enough…

It doesn’t matter, and he doesn’t let himself dwell on it. He’s a Turk, Veld trusted him, and he’ll find a way to get the job done. It’s not the first time he’s been in over his head, although it is perhaps the first time the stakes have been so high.

Within the first week of his arrival in this time, Kunsel acquired a PHS and signed himself up to every fanclub and newsletter even tangentially related to ShinRa he could get his hands on - from the Silver Elite to ShinRa’s catering monthly cookbook to the official newsletter of Urban Development to a crackpot conspiracy newsfeed focused on the Rocket Program. It’s a firehose of information, the vast majority of it useless and outright inaccurate, but Kunsel parses through it in whatever spare time he has. Information analysis had been his speciality before ShinRa went down, and there’s something pleasantly nostalgic about having to sift through mountains of noise in search for the nuggets of useful truths.

In his time, communications had dwindled to only the most urgent missives. At first for security. Later, because there wasn’t anything left to say.

Regardless, it’s with this flood of information that Kunsel discovers that Sephiroth  _does_ , in fact, still eat food in this time like a normal human being.

Which leads to Kunsel using access codes to get into ShinRa HQ, dressed in catering whites, navigating the kitchens of the executive level cafeteria with ease. The turnover in ShinRa catering is astronomical even by ShinRa standards – no one asks to see his forged credentials, much less attempt to verify them. His mere presence on the floor suggests that he’s allowed to be there – no one knows Kunsel can go to whatever floor he wants, thanks to the codes Veld had crammed into his brain before the jump.

Even with his preparation, it takes three days, spaced over a week – so nobody could get  _too_ familiar with his face – for Sephiroth’s name to get shouted into the bustling kitchen.

It still jars him when nobody reacts – or more accurately, that nobody tries to flee, or throw themselves to the floor, or hide in the cupboards to pray. The sous chef simply shouts confirmation back and adjusts the heat under a simmering pot of soup.

Kunsel has situated himself as one of the junior line cooks – a role roughly appropriate for his apparent age, but more importantly one that puts him as one of the last to touch any dish going out. He takes careful note of the order, tracking its progress amidst the bustle of white-clad sweaty-faced cooks and chefs shuffling plates and bowls and pots boiling over from stoves to countertops and back again.

When the dish of Midgar stew slides under his hands, steam curling from its surface, he slips a small vial from his sleeve, and shakes it in his fingers. The fine, translucent powder sinks into the broth, indistinguishable from the sprinkling of salt and herbs scattered across the surface. Then with hands grown practiced after three days of it, adds the finishing garnishes and passes the dish off to the server.

He completes another five orders, then shouts to the sous chef that he’s taking a toilet break. He gets sworn at for his trouble, but by then Kunsel is already halfway out the door and heading to the elevators. Through the glass doors of the executive cafeteria he catches a glimpse of Sephiroth sitting at a table with Rhapsodos and Hewley, spoon poised over a bowl of stew as they converse.

The poison is fast-acting, and far from painless. Kunsel can’t afford to wait and watch.

………………

Sephiroth appears in the background of one of ShinRa’s live broadcasts a few days later, looking none the worse for wear. Nothing in his news feed even hints at a convalescence. Kunsel silently despairs.

He’s fairly certain Sephiroth did in fact, actually eat the food. Is SOLDIER constitution so strong that they could simply shrug off a poison that could leave a behemoth dead inside of twenty minutes?

Apparently it is.

Precision is perhaps the wrong approach. Reno had once quoted to him that he and Rude believed that there was no problem that could not be solved with appropriate application of explosives.

Kunsel decides to give it a shot. He breaks into ShinRa again. Accesses the mission roster for the day, then heads down to the garages, disguised as a mechanic this time. Finds the vehicle set aside for Sephiroth’s squad, and gets to work.

………………

The news declares the car bomb a cowardly act by Wutai insurgents, and promises swift retaliation. It’s all propaganda – all part of the war machine. The conflict will continue years yet. For all that ShinRa has superior weapons and technology, they don’t know how to run a war. In the end, it was the might of SOLDIER, and SOLDIER alone, which won them the conflict.

Kunsel stares dully at the grainy picture flickering on his Sector 6 hotel’s television. A security feed of the garage, of the explosion, of the following carnage. They’d caught him on the footage too, but he’d known the camera was there, had been careful to keep every potential identifying factor covered, to never look up or give the feed the chance to catch his face.

The footage shakes, going black and white with lines of interference, before it stabilises enough to show the ShinRa troop carrier billowing with black smoke. The door tearing free, slamming halfway across the garage in three frames. And emerging from the flames and twisted metal, Sephiroth, with nothing more than some light burns and shallow scratches.

From a shrapnel bomb that should have exploded right under his feet.

The footage cuts as Sephiroth turns and does something with a materia, no doubt putting the fire out. Against his better judgement, Kunsel flicks off the TV, letting silence settle in the dark hotel room. He checks the curtains are drawn and the door barricaded, and bunkers down under a stiff, slightly scratchy blanket to sleep.

He tries not to think about the ShinRa grunts that had been in the truck with Sephiroth, who the footage hadn’t shown and the news anchors mentioned only as a footnote. He’d checked the names on the mission register beforehand, hadn’t recognised any of them, and took the gamble. He is a Turk. Getting his hands dirty for the mission is a fact of life.

It’s the fate of the world at stake. Millions of lives.

He tries not to think about how many dreams and futures he might be crushing underfoot in the process.

………………

The access codes given to him by Veld are becoming exhausted - the Turks have been on alert after his sniper attempt and exploding truck, and after one code failed to work and instead triggered an alarm, he didn't dare retry any others. There were ways of getting access without them - Kunsel is one of the better hackers from the Turks, and has the advantage of thirteen years of future knowledge of loopholes and exploits - but the risk of getting caught is unacceptable. Not until the mission is a success.

Morose, he sits in a dilapidated hotel room on the outer fringes of Sector 4 this time, bass thumping through the wall from a nightclub next door, and considers what to do next as he thumbs automatically through the news feed on his PHS.

He's running out of options, out of ideas. There’s only so much he can do as a lone agent.

The problem is SOLDIER, and always has been. The gap in reflexes, in stamina, in durability, is one the Turks have never been able to overcome even after years of trying. Sephiroth's abilities are already otherworldly. Was the jump too late?

Except Veld didn't waste resources, not in a time when they were so desperate and few and the Planet was dying. Even though it was a last-ditch solution, a wild prayer, he still wouldn't have agreed to send Kunsel on a mission he didn't think at least had a chance of success. Once the last of the SOLDIERs had been wiped out the remaining Turks had become the most effective resistance left, they couldn’t spare anyone on flights of fancy.

His thoughts stutter on that last point.

Once the last of the SOLDIERs had been wiped out.

Oh, _Shiva_.

This is why Veld sent him instead of Tseng. This is why he hadn’t bothered with sniper training before he left – or any kind of training at all, for that matter, beyond cramming facts and dates and codes and profiles into his head.

Kunsel was the best of the Turks with materia, and the only one remaining that preferred blades to guns.

"Veld, you absolute bastard," Kunsel whispers.

This is what he’d intended from the very beginning.

……………..

Kunsel signs up to take the SOLDIER exam, fully prepared to cheat his way through it, and is surprised to discover he doesn’t need to – he passes comfortably in the lower end of the two dozen successful applicants from his round of testing. He leaves his carousel of dilapidated hotel rooms behind and moves into the designated SOLDIER quarters with the rest of the fresh faced Thirds for orientation.

It’s technically a deep cover assignment, so he uses his real name. Even if the database pings a match, he is at least old enough that no one will suspect him to be the ten year old of the same name. He frets about the treatments though – he doesn’t actually know what age he should count as anymore, he’s ten in present reality, somewhere around fourteen in physicality, 23 in practice. His papers mark him as five months from sixteen, but people lying about their ages when applying to work for ShinRa is so common it’s safer for him to fudge it higher than lower.

It doesn’t seem to matter – the treatments go off without a hitch. The Time materia’s interference in his physiology is evidently a non-issue. Then Kunsel gets to go about relearning his limits with the other Thirds, and it’s abruptly terrifying. The speed and strength and senses aren’t doubled, they’re  _squared_. And he’s only a Third Class.

Sephiroth is on an entire other plane from them.  _Shiva,_  no wonder none of his strategies worked.

No wonder Veld deemed returning to a time with SOLDIER their only hope.

Kunsel throws himself into conditioning and training, doing everything he can to bridge that gap even a little. His increased reading speed makes it easier to keep up with intelligence, and now that he’s officially inside ShinRa he has access to the gossip network which he wastes no time getting plugged into. Soon enough he’s well-liked by his peers for his work ethic and eagerness to chat and develops a reputation as a safe ear to vent to who won’t blab to superiors or other SOLDIERs, and a good source of advice besides.

Nobody realises that he’s on a desperate mission with a vague deadline, discovering just how little sleep he needs to be operating at sufficient capacity. He’s a duck, laid back and content with his progress on the surface, but paddling madly underneath to make as make headway as he can.

Then it happens.

He gets the chance to spar with Sephiroth.

………………

Kunsel never intends it to be a fair fight. He’s not that naïve. It was well known even in this time that it took both Rhapsodos and Hewley together to give Sephiroth a challenge. He’s been a Third Class for only a matter of months – this is just something the Director makes the First Classes do occasionally, to assess the lower classes and provide them with motivation all in one. No one expects a Third Class to ever win.

Kunsel intends to win.

He coats his blade in a poison not-yet-developed in Wutai designed specifically to fight SOLDIERs – a deadly toxin that spreads faster with mako regeneration and causes necrosis in the wound, administered by contact with the bloodstream. He hides a second bracer in his boot, equipped with Time, Poison, and Exit materia. Underneath the bracer on his arm he nervously attaches a second, hidden spring blade, coated in the same poison as his sword. He’s risking killing himself at this point, but if he gets close enough, maybe even before or after the spar…

Anything to improve his odds.

He’s fifth in line out of six opponents, and his hopes that Sephiroth might be tiring by the time it comes to him evaporate after watching the first match. The First Class all but toys with the SOLDIER Third Kunsel has sparred with multiple times. Kunsel usually wins those spars, but not by any large margin – he’s a good match for training. And Sephiroth wipes the floor with him.

The next four skirmishes go no differently. Then it’s Kunsel’s turn to step into the training room.

He’s scared of Sephiroth. He’s a childhood nightmare made flesh. To Kunsel he’s not a superior officer, not even a man. He’s the tonberry under the bed, a blizzard brewing on the horizon, a meteor in the sky. A calamity.

This is the closest Kunsel has  _ever_  stood to his target. “Sir,” he acknowledges, voice like sandpaper against his throat.

Sephiroth merely looks faintly amused, if not a bit bored. “At ease, SOLDIER,” he counsels. “The goal is exercise, I’m not going to put you in the infirmary. Just give it your best.”

He nods woodenly, and settles into stance across from the SOLDIER First. The hologram flickers to life around them. So far it had been the Wastes, 8th Boulevard, the train yard, and the rooftop of ShinRa HQ. This time a snowy landscape whirls into view around them, and the temperature in the room drops as the cooling units shift to max.

There is depressingly little cover – a handful of boulders, a windtorn shack. It’s the worst possible setting for Kunsel.

He’s suddenly back in the remains of Modeoheim, with Veld and Tseng and Reeve and a handful of others, huddled over a stove for warmth as they listen to the latest reports of another base wiped out with no survivors.

He doesn’t hear the signal to start – only reacts at the last moment when Sephiroth  _moves_. He’s almost a flicker in his vision, and it’s only thanks to Kunsel’s heightened paranoia and freshly enhanced reflexes that he blocks the sweep of Masamune.

Then he is fighting for his life, pulling on instincts he didn’t even know he  _had_. It’s like being a kid in the slums running from bullies all over again, like scrambling from a warehouse rigged to explode. Masamune’s reach is ridiculous. Kunsel’s arms jar with every block, until he abandons that strategy altogether for dodging. Mid-leap, he casts Slow and Poison in succession, but if either effect takes hold it doesn’t show.

Some distant part of him not overridden by survival instinct tells him to get in close, to at least make a  _scratch_. He flings himself forward under Masamune with recklessness, but Sephiroth is faster, always  _faster_  - even if his eyes widen for a moment in surprise, the small, self-assured smile never leaves his face.

The same smile Kunsel has seen in footage as he slaughtered his way through ShinRa headquarters.

He feints, then double feints. Throws Lightning spells with his visibly equipped materia even as he tries to cast Slow again with the one in his hidden bracer. Sweeps with his leg through the snow to knock Sephiroth’s feet from under him but it’s still a hands-width clear of even touching his ankles.

Then suddenly Kunsel is on his back, winded, with the blunt edge of Masamune resting against his throat. Sephiroth holds it there for a moment, point made, then steps back, allowing Kunsel to scramble to his feet. The frozen tundra dissolves around them, returning to the grey steel of the training room.

“Good match,” Sephiroth says politely, and Kunsel can’t even get any satisfaction from the fact that he sounds marginally less bored than the previous four times he’s said it. “Though I hope you are not quite so… reckless in the field.”

Kunsel does not want make an impression on Sephiroth, does not want to be remembered by him in any way. “You’re too good, sir, to actually let me get hurt. I took advantage of that.”

Sephiroth lets out a small hum at that. “Not particularly sporting,” he says, but there is no censure in his words.

Kunsel shrugs. “Sportsmanship doesn’t have any place in the field. Not if you’re up against a superior opponent.”

“True enough,” Sephiroth agrees, though the words sound academic on his tongue. Sephiroth has never faced a superior opponent. His attention turns away then, to the sixth unlucky victim of the day. Kunsel pulls himself from the training room and slumps against the wall in the viewing area, waving off the consolations and well wishes of the various spectators. He’s not really in the mood.

He’d given it everything, and he hadn’t so much as whiffed Sephiroth. It wasn’t even close.

Kunsel is ready to give in to despair.

Then another Third Class squats next to him. Black hair, swagger – Kunsel identifies him as the young hotshot who passed the test just a few weeks ago, with the highest score since Sephiroth himself, entering SOLDIER at the tender age of 14.

“Hi!” he greets him with a big smile. “That was a hell of a fight. You really went for it. Most of the rest of the guys looked like they’d given up before they even started.”

Kunsel shrugs, and forces a wan grin. “Didn’t make any difference in the end.”

“I dunno, you actually forced him to defend a couple of times,” he offers. “No one else managed that yet. I’m Zack Fair, by the way. I’m just new to the program, but we should spar sometime.”

The name isn’t familiar, but then, it had only been a few squads of Second Class SOLDIERs who had survived the first purge anyway. “I’m Kunsel,” he replies. “And sure, what’s your PHS number?” Kunsel needs more training, evidently. “Hit me up anytime.”

……………….

It’s just a germ of an idea. But when Kunsel sees how  _easy_  Zack finds everything, how he’s such a natural…

Kunsel can’t defeat Sephiroth. He’s tried every underhanded tactic at his disposal, short of detonating charges under ShinRa headquarters and dropping the entire building on him. Some days Kunsel is tempted. But he’s not ready to kill thousands of people to get to one just yet. Especially when he’s not sure if that would even work.

He can’t defeat Sephiroth, but maybe he can get others to do it for him.

So Kunsel embarks on a campaign to do everything he can, as covertly as he can, to groom Zack into the ultimate SOLDIER.

He gets him missions with the Turks, thinking ahead to worst case scenarios when they’ll need to ally. His gives up his precious time in the Training Room in favour of Zack. He teaches him everything he’s learned about materia, and watches with part pride and part relief as Zack effortlessly surpasses him.

Sometimes he feels like he’s raising a lamb for slaughter.

The trouble is, he’s surprised to find that he genuinely  _likes_  Zack. He’s become so used to viewing the people around him as either risks or resources or collateral that when he realises he’s actually made a true friend it throws him for a loop. He has no idea where Zack was in his original timeline, and no way of finding out – his best guess is that he was a casualty in a mission or the Wutai War, a promising SOLDIER taken out long before he had the chance to reach his full potential. There’s a certain randomness to the battlefield, possibly just the tiniest ripple caused by his presence.

But in light of his own failings, Zack is his best chance. The  _Planet’s_  best chance.

Maybe its only chance.

………………

At some point, Kunsel gets promoted to Second Class, and it honestly catches him off guard. He’s a Turk playing at SOLDIER, but somehow all the training he’s been doing with Zack - along with all of the skills acquired in his previous life – is enough to elevate him above what is already considered the elite.

Zack gets promoted right along with him even though Kunsel started months before his friend did and he’s still ignorant of half of what it takes to be SOLDIER – his talent just shines that bright. Hewley has even singled him out for mentorship, and Zack cheerfully bends his ear on a regular basis about how great the First Class is and how much he’s learning.

Kunsel just grins and congratulates him. It makes his stomach twist, but at this point in time there is nothing else he can do or say about it. Hewley can take Zack further than Kunsel ever will.

It serves to remind him, though, that he still needs to do something about Rhapsodos and Hewley, even if they are a lower priority than Sephiroth. Rhapsodos had fallen to degradation in the end, and Hewley had disappeared immediately after Midgar’s destruction. No one knew what happened for sure, but Veld had suspected that it had been a bridge too far for Hewley’s particular brand of morality to cross. But in the end they were still Sephiroth’s allies, and  _anything_  he can do to weaken Sephiroth is worth trying.

Rhapsodos is the weak point. Reports suggested degradation had sent him mad in the end, and the murmurs around the SOLDIER floor already show the earliest symptoms of it – a poetry hobby turning into an obsession, temper no longer just short but growing volatile, flights of fancy turning into full blown delusions. Hewley would be a harder nut to crack, but having learned some more of the man via Zack, the way to do it would be through Rhapsodos – the two of them far closer friends with each other than with Sephiroth.

He can’t act directly. But if he can turn even a portion of that bitterness towards Sephiroth, to use those circumstances to drive a wedge between the trio, he has to try. So he falls back on his Turk training, leaves suspicious files where Rhapsodos will find them, misdirects mails, drips poison into a network of ears who repeat it and warp it and it all feeds into Rhapsodos’s paranoia, into his insecurities and rage.

Sometime later, when he goes to the Training Room and finds it down for maintenance, he hears the story of a spar between the top three First Class SOLDIERs gone wrong.

Two months after that, Rhapsodos is deployed to Wutai, and immediately deserts with his entire squadron.

Kunsel feels the first stirrings of hope. Finally,  _finally_ , he’s changed something.

…………………….

In the wake of Genesis’s desertion, he’s sent to Wutai, along with the rest of the available SOLDIERs. He jumps at the chance, feeding information on the sly of Sephiroth’s movements to the enemy.

Sephiroth cuts down everyone who comes after him with ease, however, and Kunsel is uneasily reminded of his own words. In a real fight, one with stakes, there is no sportsmanship.

Eventually, Hewley and Zack are sent to take down Fort Tamblin, and not long after that Sephiroth and the rest of the SOLDIER forces are diverted there as well. The Wutai War ends, a good nine months earlier than it did in Kunsel’s original timeline. Hewley vanishes once Fort Tamblin falls, and an uneasiness settles over the SOLDIERs who remain.

Kunsel’s not sure what any of it means – whether he’s accelerated the point of no return, or delayed it.

He holds his course. Zack is still his best bet at defeating Sephiroth. And in the background, Kunsel will strip away everything that might make Sephiroth stronger.

……………

He’s tried to kill Sephiroth multiple times – once, face to face with nothing but steel and materia. And yet, this might be the most danger Kunsel has been in yet.

“Please, take a seat,” Tseng offers. “SOLDIER Second Class Kunsel, correct?”

“That’s me,” Kunsel answers, settling into the office chair on the other side of the desk easily. The room is painfully quiet, with only the background hum of an air conditioner to break the silence. An interview disguised as an interrogation. Maybe it would work if Kunsel hadn’t been taught the Turk handbook on it.

He knew this was coming, at least – the gossip network gave him a handful of hours advance notice - so he’s prepared enough to school his reactions at suddenly being face to face with a Tseng in possession of all of his fingers and a distinct lack of burn scarring on his face. He looks so terribly young, and Kunsel abruptly feels so very old. Tseng had been one of his mentors, and it’s hard not to still think of him as such. Hard not to be intimidated by the thought of circumnavigating Veld’s right hand man.

“What’s all this about?” he asks, because not asking would be suspicious. Tseng’s answer will tell him a lot about how this interview will be conducted.

“Given the recent desertions, the Turks are holding interviews with all SOLDIERs,” Tseng explains. “It’s mostly a formality at this point but there are a number of irregularities with events in Wutai that we are still attempting to pin down.”

“What kind of irregularities?” Kunsel asks.

“Our intelligence suggests a mole within SOLDIER was feeding the Wutai forces information.”

Kunsel lets a flicker of surprise cross his face, but doesn’t let it stay – surprise that lingers too long is a trick of acting, not reality. He’s no thespian, but Veld chose him for this deep cover mission for more than just his potential at SOLDIER. “A mole?” He tilts his head. He’d been careful in covering his tracks, but if the Turks had counterintelligence it makes sense that they would catch wind of the leak. “Well, it wasn’t me. I can’t think of anyone who would have any reason to, either. In SOLDIER, anyway.”

“And yet Sephiroth’s squadron suffered multiple ambushes, despite marching orders being kept on a need to know basis,” Tseng remarks.

This is a fishing expedition, then. It won’t work – Kunsel knows how to hide the truth in plain sight. “Wait, that was-” he cuts himself off.

Tseng’s gaze is laser-focused on him now. “Something the matter?”

Kunsel ducks his head. “Ah, sorry. It’s just… I mean, I noticed there were a lot of ambushes. But I thought that was on purpose?”

“On… purpose?”

Flummoxing Tseng is one of the brightest moments he’s enjoyed so far. It’s not the same Tseng, but it’s been so long since his mentor has reacted with  _anything_  other than cold, logical analysis or quiet, desolate acceptance…

Kunsel pushes the thought away. He can’t afford to get caught up in those memories, not here and now. “Yeah. I thought ShinRa was broadcasting Sephiroth’s position themselves.”

Tseng stares at him, and Kunsel has officially derailed whatever investigative train the Turk was conducting. “What led you to that conclusion?”

Kunsel shrugs. “He’s the strongest ShinRa has, isn’t he? Nothing the Wutai threw at him so much as scratched him. I figured he was bait to lure out and destroy their strongest forces, so the rest of our squadrons could have a clear run.” He scratches the back of his neck sheepishly. “You’re saying it  _wasn’t_ supposed to work like that?”

In truth, Kunsel had gambled on the reputation of the Crimson Elite, who had in his timeline taken down a not insignificant number of SOLDIERs. Of course, Sephiroth had cleaved through that opposition as easily as every other attempt on his life.

Tseng folds his hands in his lap, and doesn’t answer for a long moment. Eventually, he relents, “While you’re not wrong, it wasn’t planned that way, no. To our benefit, but we would still like to know how it happened.”

What rolls after is just process – Tseng has already decided he isn’t guilty and is going through the motions. Kunsel maintains the same easy geniality that has carried him through most of his life, made him friends and made him forgettable in equal measure.

Somehow, he finishes the interview without losing his head. He nearly falters at the end though, when Tseng goes to shake his hand and Kunsel’s brain spazzes out –  _all fingers, no pain_  – but he pushes through it and heads out of the office, and doesn’t stop walking until he’s back in the privacy of his quarters.

It’s tempting,  _so_ tempting, to confide in Tseng. To seek out Veld, or Reeve, or any of his old comrades. They had been  _family_ , and he can’t even  _warn_  them.

These halls are filled with ghosts. In SOLDIER he could almost ignore it, lost in a sea of unfamiliar faces, most of them dead before he ever had the chance to meet them. Whenever he brushes by a Turk, however, he’s thrown back into that future he’s trying to prevent. A dying Planet and the last few desperate ants on its surface, searching for a way to survive.

It’s an unexpectedly lonely feeling, knowing that if he succeeds, no one else will know that world.

Veld had impressed the importance of secrecy upon him though, more than anything else. Kunsel had known what he was signing up for. Trying to recruit anyone to his cause, to even attempt to prove time travel or future knowledge, would net him a one-way ticket into the bowels of the Science Department.

It doesn’t make it any easier.

………………….

Kunsel’s sense of time is vaguely messed up, has been since the jump – time seems to pass both far too fast and with agonising slowness. Some days Kunsel feels more SOLDIER than Turk – on others he can’t seem to forget for even a moment that he’s lying to literally everybody he’s met over the past two years.

Things seem to happen faster after Genesis’s desertion, however. Part of it is how busy SOLDIER is kept with their diminished numbers, dealing with Wutai rebels and other insurgents and Rhapsodos’s copies. More of it is the new uncertainty of how events will play out.

He does what he can to keep helping Zack between everything, though Zack has by now so easily surpassed him it’s more just keeping tabs on him and funnelling whatever resources he can his way.

Hewley dies by Zack’s hand. Kunsel’s condolences feel hollow and insincere on his tongue, but he does what he can to support his friend. Zack is promoted to First Class and sent on mandatory leave, then brought back again when ShinRa realises he’s one of the few SOLDIERs able to stand up to Rhapsodos. Rhapsodos is reported dead multiple times without actual confirmation from anyone involved.

Sephiroth is still alive, but withdrawing. Kunsel waits every day for the alarms to sound, to spring into action. They never found out what the exact trigger was in his time, but Veld postulated it had begun with Rhapsodos ailing from degradation. That  _particular_  tangent has occurred early, but with Rhapsodos’s desertion and Hewley’s death, will Sephiroth act the same way on his own? Kunsel doesn’t know, but it’s safe to assume he might, given both his allies had passed before the Purges began. The pivotal moment has yet to come, but when it does, he’s going to be ready. He’ll bring ShinRa headquarters down on them all to stop it. Better a few thousand dead in Midgar than the Planet.

Then Rhapsodos launches a coordinated attack against ShinRa’s mako reactors.

…………….

Kunsel’s mission concludes without a problem. He gets some vicarious satisfaction from killing Rhapsodos’s copies – as a Second Class, most of them go down easy. As a young Turk, even a lone, weak one turned into a deadly faceoff.

Zack’s mission takes longer. He’s assigned with Sephiroth, which is suspicious in that ShinRa would concentrate their firepower like that. Kunsel can’t do anything about it half a world away though, and not being in the same building as Sephiroth does wonders for his nerves. So with his two main projects out of reach, he keeps himself busy in other ways, and goes to introduce himself to Zack’s girlfriend.

The church is empty when he arrives, but the flowers steal his breath away at first sight. Cautiously, he reaches out to touch them, as though to check they’re real.

He’s heard about this place, from Tseng. The girl who could grow flowers without sunlight in the middle of Midgar.

The Last Ancient.

Things had already been bad, but Tseng told him once, in a low whisper in the dead of a cold night on watch, that there had still been hope while she was alive. That even if the Planet had been so terribly damaged, it could still be healed, if they could at least stop Sephiroth.

She’d died, Tseng said. In the same purge that left Tseng disfigured and with only half a hand.

Four months later, Reeve began the Time Materia Project.

“Hello?” a timid voice echoes from the church entrance. “Can I help you?”

Kunsel jerks back his hand as though the flowers burn, and straightens, scrambling for composure. “Oh, you must be Aerith, right? I’m Kunsel.”

She peers at him, not coming closer. Untrusting. Good, she’s smart. “You’re SOLDIER, right? What are you doing here?”

“I’m a friend of Zack’s,” he offers sheepishly. “Sorry for barging in like this. Zack told me about the church, and since I was in the area, I wanted to see it for myself.”

She relaxes at that, and finally approaches him. She’s wearing a simple white dress, and her brown hair frames her face with soft curls. Not exactly the image he’d held of the fabled last of the Ancients. “You like the flowers?”

“Yeah,” he says softly, turning back to gaze at them, to force himself not to stare at her. The  _Last Ancient_. Zack’s  _girlfriend_. Shiva’s breeches. He can’t get over it. “How long have you been growing them?”

They chat for a while – safe topics like the flowers, Zack, her startup business, good places to eat in the nearby markets. Kunsel shares a few embarrassing stories he’s collected about Zack and is rewarded by Aerith’s giggles and growing relaxation with him.

There’s a broken flower wagon in the corner – a cute little handmade thing, but it’s clear something’s gone wrong with the wheels, a broken or misaligned axel maybe. He’s heard about this too, although more he figured it out when Zack swung through ShinRa one day looking for parts.

“I could probably fix that for you, if you want,” he offers. “Zack’s still on the West Continent, at a minimum it’ll be a few days before he gets back.”

She bites her lip, and folds her hands. “Thank you but it’s fine. It can wait.”

She wants Zack to do it. Kunsel grins, and gives her a quick salute. “Sure thing. Here, let me give you my PHS number before I head off though. We can coordinate next time his birthday comes around.”

Kunsel mostly wants an excuse to  _have_  her PHS number – he’s technically already stolen it from Zack, but Shiva. The Last Ancient. Veld and Tseng hadn’t included her in their briefings at  _all_. Maybe didn’t want to burden him with someone to protect on top of his main mission.

She accepts it with a small smile and waves him off with a complimentary flower that he insists on paying for anyway.

As much as he wants to stay all afternoon, he knows the Turks are likely monitoring the place, and he’s not in their favour the same way he’s insured Zack is. Kunsel is going to look out for her anyway, of course. Was going to just when he thought she was Zack’s girlfriend and not the  _Last Ancient_.

Shiva, Zack.

He’s going to tell him off so hard when he returns from Nibelheim.

…………….

Except Zack never comes back from Nibelheim.

The news arrives via company newsletter, an innocuous blip from his PHS.

Sephiroth is dead.

He stares at the screen, numb. Uncomprehending. He should be elated, he thinks. Or at the very least relieved. His plan worked. Kunsel has succeeded. He’s diverted the course of history. They’ve saved  _millions_  of lives.

All he feels is tired.

His fellow SOLDIERs get together, plan a trip to Goblin Bar to toast the fallen. The company swirls with rumour and conspiracy. Kunsel goes through the motions, suddenly adrift.

No one will ever know. No one will ever thank him for it. No one else will ever know that cold and dying world, where the sky was filled with ash, and the airwaves fell silent, where even weeds no longer wanted to grow. No one will know what disaster has been averted. No one will understand why he sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night with the overwhelming urge to throw up.

Sephiroth is dead, but so is Zack.

And Kunsel wonders if it was worth it.

 

 

 


End file.
